Soldering iron tip care myth: don't use abrasives on the tip

[KL27x]

if you have problems using two hands at once and remembering to pick up the solder, it might not be the tool for you.

It's just you have to actually stop to pick this up. And unless you are ambidextrous, you have to move the iron to your leftie. The brass wool is in my iron stand, ready to jab/swipe whenever needed. It's just a little different, and a bit of a pain. I am sure it helps.

My theory why people run into issues with tips is they are hesitant to apply solder to the entire tinned section of the tip when not in use

I totally agree with almost* your entire post, to be clear, including this.

This is one of the many reasons I get away with as little care I do with a CF bevel. Whenever the tip has at least a little solder on it, it covers the entire tinned area. When you use a lot of other tip types... say a bevel, a chisel, or conical... quite often you do not use the entire tinnable surface. So if you are soldering for long periods of time, it might start to oxidize up there, even if you were to cover it with solder when you are done. This the reason for frequent cleaning with sponge or brass I suppose.

They use the sponge then solder for some time, sponging again only occasionally.

Honestly, with the CF tip, I only use the brass wool very occasionally. Usually the reason is to
1. remove excess solder prior to soldering something that is extra-sensitive to bridging, like say an FPC connector).
2. to remove burned flux on the side over the chromed area
3. to remove xtra component that I accidentally picked up.

The CF tip really just keeps ticking. The reason I might occasionally need to resurface my CF is probably because it is so hard to mess up that I occasionally put it back in the stand completely solder-starved without even thinking about it. I mean, until I had received the negative consequences, I started to think the tip was unstoppable. Months and months before those consequences appear, and tada; I have bad habits that sometimes resurface.

*Only thing I disagree is where you say platings. I agree people unwitting damage one of those platings, but I don't think the iron plating is accidentally damaged very often at all. I think that is quite hard to do without having the actual intention. I imagine it's so unlikely as to be essentially impossible. If I were to take one of my conical tips, chuck it in a drill, and hold 400 grit sandpaper over the tip while spinning it at full speed... I don't think it would significantly damage the iron plating, unless I moved to fresh area of sandpaper several times and spun the tip for several minutes. And I would see obvious huge amounts of material removal well before the plating was worn through. It would be obvious I had resurfaced the tip long long time ago. It is accurate, in my mind, to worry more about misshaping your tip than it is to worry about wearing through the iron plating. You'd have to be beyond any sort of reason to damage the iron on accident.

IOW, I don't believe the iron plating wearing through is cause of most tip replacements. It's not the limiting factor in most cases. I think most tips are replaced because they are oxidized, and the user just buys another after trying the "right" methods to clean it, which some (like that brush) can't remove a heavier oxidation in any reasonable amount of time and effort. In over 20 years of soldering, including 4-5 years of part time production soldering, I have never worn through the iron plating on a tip.

[KL27x]

Here's another way to imagine tip wear. An SOP gullwing lead is about 6 mils tall/thick. The average iron thickness is, say 4-15, by popular current manufacturer brochure. Say you drag-soldered a million of these IC's with a large bevel tip, to the point you wore through the iron. There'd be a groove in the tip of the iron the depth of those gullwing pin ends.

devil's advocate: "But the tip wears through oxidation."

Ok.

Let's assume abrasive wear through soldering is zero. There's nothing harder than iron in the surface coating of the IC pins, so wear through abrasion is insignificant. Oxidation is the main or only culprit. We protect from oxidation by tinning the tip. The part of most tips that should probably oxidize the most is perhaps the part of the tip between the bead and the chrome line. That area might not get tinned as often, as Shock has also previously suggested. So when we constantly clean the iron with sponge/brass/brush, we are removing more iron oxides from the iron plating near the chrome line.

What's the failure mode, then, of the iron plating wearing out? An ulcer or crater forms? At or near the chrome line, way up high on the shaft? I don't imagine this is the case. (Well, I have to acknowledge Blueskull's anecdote of dissolving a lead-free tip in lead solder, but I think it might be considered an exception ).

Maybe the iron is thicker up there? OK. So now, what's the failure mode? And do you think you would be able to notice when the 1 mil chromeline step turned into a 7 mils one? Do you think you'd notice when your knife (-tip  ) got dull? Would you notice when the point on your stabby bent conical receded into a vague blob shape?

Go back to that SOP IC. Do you think you could abrade those pins enough to completely resurface them without erasing the entire pin? Imagine any best and/or practical method you can. Do you think maybe you could abrade away less than half of the thickness on the pin, if you tried super duper hard? Or do you imagine you could even shine just the surface of those pins quite easily?

The copper underneath the iron plating was swaged in a die. There might be a few tiny low spots (or voids), but there are absolutely no high spots. Any high spot before iron plating would be needlessly detrimental to quality and failure rate; it could be easily avoided. Tumbling could be done for very little cost, if it were even necessary. This is why use of even files (in the spirit of meaning a rigid abrasive surface) is ok to shine up an iron tip. The chrome, OTOH, is way thinner and more brittle. AND it is plated over the iron layer. The iron layer is uneven and it receives some sort of machining or sanding to varying levels of finishing before the chrome is plated. Depending how well it was finished, there may be high spots, which is further reason the chrome layer may be very sensitive to abrasives on some areas of some tips.

[Shock]

It's just you have to actually stop to pick this up. And unless you are ambidextrous, you have to move the iron to your leftie. The brass wool is in my iron stand, ready to jab/swipe whenever needed. It's just a little different, and a bit of a pain. I am sure it helps.

I see what you mean, but in practice it's not hard to clean with either hand for me. When it comes to cleaning anyway different solders (fluxes) being used ends up with different results.

Here's another way to imagine tip wear...
devil's advocate: "But the tip wears through oxidation."

What causes the tips to wear and fail normally is thermal stress, mechanical stress and slow dissolving of plating, which is dependent on the flux and frequency of use.

Proper technique is just to apply contact pressure with the irons tip. But even if you applied no pressure at all, the tips iron plating is slowly dissolving through coming into contact with solder and flux.

In a weird way any cleaning is going to slowly reduce tip life but the trade off is increased efficiency and quality of soldering, which may end up increasing tip life.

[DimitriP]

I enjoy tip cleaning threads as much as bicycle  washing videos (you haven't lived if you haven't watched a bicycle washing video!).
It's your tip, do whatever makes you feel good about cleaning it
If you take a belt sander to it and now it's worse don't come crying here.
If you are  cleaning it using only angel feathers and it won't come clean don't come crying here.

I like the damp sponge. I enjoy the audible tss everytime I touch the sponge.
Sometimes I'll turn the iron on just to touch the sponge in order to hear the tss.

[Shock]

I like the damp sponge. I enjoy the audible tss everytime I touch the sponge.
Sometimes I'll turn the iron on just to touch the sponge in order to hear the tss.

The death cry of the tip as it begs for forgiveness heheh.

[KL27x]

What causes the tips to wear and fail normally is thermal stress, mechanical stress and slow dissolving of plating, which is dependent on the flux and frequency of use.

I finally wore out a hakko tip. It appears to me to have failed through abrasion.

It's probably had a year or more of heavy soldering, and my CSF25 has started to not perform so well on QFN's when using the right edge. That's the edge I have mainly used for IC's. This edge has been swiped across the shoulder of several thousands of gull wing IC pins as well as QFN's. The left side was working great, still.

After a wipedown and close examination under the microscope, I saw that this part of the "edge" was totally blunt and rounded over. I suppose it could be oxidation+flux cycles, but it looks just like it is worn down, with a secondary rounded bevel on the bottom of the cut face towards the rounded over part of the edge. This is exactly where I drag it over gull wing pins. So the edge wouldn't reach into the 0.3mm corner between the QFN and the PCB, anymore. It still worked, but I had to blob a bit of extra solder onto the tip, and sometimes it would still miss a pin and would take more than the typical single swipe. The chrome has long since worn away from the bottom 3-4 mm of the tip all around except for the heel. This tip has done a lot of soldering. I tried to stone it back to shape, but it was too big a job for a fine machinist stone.

Well, I have a disc sander with 80 grit paper. A couple touches to the cut face and I got the crisp edge back. And I didn't break through to the copper. Fired her up, and she's back to new... QFN magic. This stuff sneaks up on you. I am zipping through pcb's twice as fast, and I'm irked at the extra work I put myself through this past month or two. When things work first try, every time, it makes things go sooo much faster. I suppose, now, she'll be good for another year of heavy use.

I basically sharpened a soldering iron tip.

Lesson, AFAIC, is that until the tip craters, it's not necessarily done being awesome. I have never yet cratered a Hakko tip, but we'll see. And tips might occasionally need replacing/maintaining, even if they wet and solder most things just fine.

[nukie]

I have expensive JBC tips and very cheap eBay 936 tips. All I know is that certain lead free solder flux is corrosive and very high temperature kill tips. I never have issue with wet sponge thermal shock tips. I have tips as old as 15 years and some tips die quickly. When I know I am dealing with high temperature and corrosive flux I use my beater tips.

[KL27x]

The ones that die, quickly, you might like to try using a more aggressive cleaner. If it is dead, then sanding/filing won't make it any deader. Of course, tossing it and putting on the spare might be more expedient.

Ordering a new one was my first thought. But I have a similar tip in slightly larger and smaller sizes, so I took 5 minutes to try the belt sander.

[Smith]

I used sponges about 10-20 years back. Use to replace the tips quite often because they would wear out (oxidize the tip). When I started using the brass wool (or whatever you call it) they started lasting much longer. Nowadays my new soldering irons power down after a while, and I never replaced a tip because of oxidization again. I only clean the tip with the brass wool before putting it back in the stand, I never apply new solder. They mostly end a violent death removing stubborn components as the 200 pound gorilla I am.

I had some tips that would not "stick to" solder anymore, and dipping it in my Weller solder tip activator solved it in a few seconds. But this is maybe once in 1 or 2 years. This was mostly after removing some very old solder, or solder that was heavily corroded by electrolytes or other contamination.